Case Study: LinkedIn achieves optimized global performance and availability with Catchpoint

Ensuring Availability Across a Massive Global Footprint and User Base

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with over 500 million users, relies on a complex mix of first- and third‑party infrastructure—multiple DNS providers, several CDNs and an internal CDN—to serve a global audience. Ensuring low latency and high availability everywhere, especially in regions with weaker local infrastructure (China, India, parts of Asia and South America), required real‑time visibility into end‑user performance so the SRE team could detect localized problems and hand off traffic to the appropriate vendor before users were impacted.

To solve this, LinkedIn partnered with Catchpoint to run synthetic web transactions and dual DNS monitors from a global fleet of 600+ backbone and last‑mile agents, capturing headers for every object, applying CDN performance thresholds, and piping results into LinkedIn’s systems via real‑time webhooks. Combined with historical analytics, custom visualizations and shareable public URLs, this approach accelerated detection and root‑cause analysis, enabled proactive CDN failover and streamlined vendor troubleshooting—preserving user experience and maximizing availability.

LinkedIn

Samir Jafferali

Edge Performance Sre